What Heaven is Like

Karla Voss’s husband Daniel died on a Tuesday in March. His heart stopped for six minutes. He lived four more days-and never remembered a thing about where he’d gone.Unable to let the question rest, Karla spends two years tracking down six strangers who share something extraordinary: each of them died, if only for a few minutes, and came back.There’s Mike, a hardened construction foreman who found no gates or angels-just an overwhelming warmth that knew every failure he’d ever hidden, and loved him anyway. Kathy, a burned-out marketing executive who felt herself dissolve into something larger than a body, larger than a name. John, a widowed veteran who walked to the edge of a pasture gate and found his wife of forty-one years waiting, exactly as she’d looked the day he married her. Peggy, an ICU nurse who expected theology and got her mother’s kitchen instead-and a coffee cake that wasn’t ready yet. Cody, a lonely twelve-year-old who found a place where, for the first time, everybody already liked him. And Lisa, thirteen and grieving her dying father, who found something with no face and no name that told her, without words, that she would survive what was coming.Six people. Six minutes, give or take. Six visions of the other side that refuse to agree on a single detail-and somehow, Karla comes to believe, aren’t in conflict at all.What Heaven Is Like moves between six unforgettable kitchen-table confessions and one woman’s quiet reckoning with her own loss, building toward a final truth Karla never expected to find: that the answer was never going to be singular, and that maybe it was never supposed to be.Tender, haunting, and deeply human, this novel doesn’t ask you to believe in any one heaven. It asks you to consider that whatever waits on the other side may be as varied-and as real-as the people who glimpse it.